The Cosmic Graph

One reality, five failures: the Cosmic Graph and the Modes of Failure enacted upon it

One engraved dependence graph of twenty-four symbols in four registers beneath the circumpunct of the One, brightest at the summit, beneath a row of six stations. In the Reality station the graph is read truly, at rest in its canonical form: hovering or focusing any symbol kindles its chain of dependence upward to the circumpunct in gold, with everything else dimmed, and shows its register's definition in the panel at the foot of the page; the four register labels at the left margin also fill the panel, in every station. Choosing one of the five mode stations - Absolutisation, Instrumentalisation, Occlusion, Confusion, Inversion - suspends the kindling entirely (the symbols become inert, unreachable by Tab) and instead commits that failure bodily upon the graph: edges are torn out and an orphaned island sags away on stretched tethers, a false edge contracts like a hook and drags its captive sideways, an occluded symbol wanders blurred and unresolved, a mistaken symbol rises three strata on edges dragged long and thin, a dependence swaps places with its principle so the arrow points the wrong way - and the wounded members alone take a dim ember tint. Tab moves through the stations, then the register labels, then the twenty-four symbols when Reality is active, then the caption's term; Enter or Space commits a mode; Escape restores Reality.

Fig. V - the Territory and its five broken maps: kindle any symbol in Reality; commit each failure and watch the map betray it. The Cosmic Graph.

Design note: at the summit the One is a circumpunct - indicated, never depicted: every line dissolves and stops short of the ring, and the brightest region of the plate remains untouched ground. In Reality, kindle any symbol and only its ancestry answers in gold, up to and including the circumpunct; choose one of the Five Modes of Failure instead and the springs of dependence carry the whole engraved body to its wounded shape - an edge torn out, a false edge contracted, an edge unseen, a node mistaken, a dependence reversed. The ember tint is the one colour admitted on this page, worn by the mutilated members alone, because sin is the only thing here that is not a degree of light.